Chapter 44: Editing Palettes

There are multiple ways to edit palettes and find the values to change them to.

Method 1: Editing Uncompressed Palettes with SNES Palette Editor

SNES Palette Editor works fine for GBA too, trust me. Download it from google or something and open it up. Load your ROM and go to the offset where your palette is (we already located the palette in the last chapter). Make sure your palette is uncompressed. See my guide in the previous chapter for telling the difference between compressed and uncompressed.

YESZ! We can clearly see the colors and their values. We can even see the Raw Color value and the RGB. If we wanted, we could even do searches for colors, but that’s not really my thing, so I didn’t cover that in my previous chapter’s instructions.

To edit the color, we can drag the bars left and right until we get the color we want. To change which color we’re editing, we just hit the ^ arrow next to the “Address:” slot/the offset. If you want to use a specific color, you can get the color’s RGB from MS Paint or some other program (this is a spriting thing really…), round each value to the nearest multiple of 8, and then divide.

However, converting colors like this can sometimes be a pain, and this method only works for uncompressed palettes, unfortunately.

Method 2: Getting the RGB of a Color and Converting to Hex

I don’t exactly have a color I want to use for this title screen background, so I’m just going to show you how to get the rgb of some random color on a portrait.

Load up MS Paint or another program, zoom in, and use the eyedropper tool to select the color you want to find the RGB of. Often times you can see the RGB off to a window on a side for programs like Photoshop or Corel Paint Shop Pro. I’ll just show you how to do it in MS Paint:

(You can’t see my eyedropper, but I’m about to select the light orangish/brownish color.)

After it’s selected, go to Colors-> Edit Colors… and hit “Define Custom Colors” so that the following pops up (except with whatever color you’re using):

To the far right you can easily change the shade of the color to something lighter or darker. You can also pick another color from the rainbow-like area. What’s most important is the RGB: it is 248, 208, 112.

With this, we can A) round it (it’s already rounded, actually…) to the nearest multiple of 8 and divide by 8 to get the RGB on a 0-31 scale, then put it in SNES Palette Editor or B) put it into GBA Color Picker and get the hex value to use with SNES Palette Editor or a hex editor. We’re going to do B.

Download, extract, and open up GBA color picker. Put in the RGB for your color and it’ll get the nearest match—and it does the rounding, too.

We now have the hex for this color—3B5F. If we put this in a hex editor to replace another color though, we have to reverse the order as usual. You can hit the “Byteswap?” checkbox in GBA Color Picker if you want, but it only does it once, meaning if you edit the RGB input, it’s not going to byteswap it again (you have to click the button everytime to byteswap, pretty much).

By the way, GBA Color Picker crashes if you leave one of the RGB slots empty (without a value). So don’t use backspace to delete the numbers there or it’ll freak out and crash.

So we take the color we’re trying to replace and put in the hex we got. We use this for every color until we’re done. We can use this to replace uncompressed or compressed colors as since we’re humans, we can just skip the ‘00s’ that occur every once in a while in compressed palettes and only replace the bytes that are actually color bytes.

Method 3: Editing Palettes with GBA Graphics Editor

This method involves Nintenlord’s GBAGE. Hopefully you know the very basics of how to work it—have Net Framework 3.5 or higher installed (or Mono, the Linux/other equivalent), how to load a ROM, how to save, and how to input offsets and navigate through images.

After loading GBAGE and your ROM, we need to locate the image you want to change. You can scroll through all the images if you want, you can find out the offset by debugging, you can find it by logic and a hex editor (the palette and the offset are often close to each other, so if you find the palette the graphics might be nearby—it’s up to you to search in a hex editor and find it, not me), or you can see if someone else knows. I happen to have some FE7 offsets, but I’m pretty clueless on FE6 and FE8, so you’ll have to “manually” search those games by scrolling through the images (or you can just use another method to edit palettes…).

Anyway, I happen to know that in GBAGE the title screen background image is at 1369 (offset 66AF8C). The preferred size is 30x32*. We already located our palette at 66AF6C, so we put that into the “ROMPalette Offset” slot of the Palette Control… hey, wait, that’s only 0x20 bytes before the graphics! Oh look, that stuff I said about logic before was actually kinda helpful maybe!

*30x20 will work too. The size is just the # of tiles the image is, with each tile being 8 pixels. The screen is 240x160, and 240/8 = 30 and 160/8 = 20, but it doesn’t matter how large you make the height because there aren’t any graphics to load anyhow.

If you’ve done everything I told you, it should look like that. Actually, it looks kinda weird, doesn’t it? The top left tile (8x8 pixel piece) is missing, and it’s in the bottom left… The reason why the game does that is because it recognizes the first pixel it sees as transparent, and the first pixel would normally be a blue one, so it uses this image where the first pixel is green (the transparent color). To make up for the distorted layout of the graphic, it uses TSA. I suggest you read up on the battle background and CG chapters for this to make more sense.

Anyway, back to relevant information. We have the palette loaded. We can save the image as a PNG, edit the colors using Usenti by changing the RGB values to what we want (click on the colors in Usenti and just put your own RGB/use the scrolly thingies), save the image, and then re-import it. When you reimport the image, all that matters is that you replace the old palette with the new palette.

Yup, I wouldn’t even have anything else checked. Once you import the palette, save your ROM, and you should be done.

With that, we’ve found our colors and replaced the old colors and made our palette changes. After saving, we can load VBA and check out our palette changes to see if they look good, turned out right, and give us a refreshing feeling.